Happy New Year to Liliana and family.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/watch/jojo-and-gran-gran-lunar-new-year
How do people celebrate Lunar New Year?
IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
People eat special food, including noodles, which represent having a long life.
They also dress up in traditional clothes, sing and dance and light red lanterns.
There are also firework displays, parades and lion dancing.
Lion dancing is a spectacular part of the celebrations
It is also time for people to meet up with family, and lots of people travel to see their friends and relations at this time of year.
Sometimes children are also given red envelopes with money inside.
Often people clean their houses before the new year, to sweep bad luck away.
Why are the years named after animals?
01:57 Media caption,
Lunar New Year: How some children in Manchester are celebrating (2024)
In Chinese tradition each year is named after one of 12 different animals of the Chinese zodiac: Rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
The order of the years supposedly comes from a story about a race across a river which was set by the Jade Emperor.
The animals all wanted the year to be named after them so they competed to cross the river the fastest and, through cunning, the rat won.
Then the other animals got to be named after a year in the order they finished the race. There is a 12 year cycle of animal names.
There are some differences in the zodiac animals across different countries, for example in Vietnam, they celebrate the Year of the Cat instead of Rabbit and in Japan it's a boar instead
